Our article comparing Hungarian trusts and asset management foundations has just been published in Trusts & Trustees, as part of their special issue on Private Foundations: A World Review 2026. Written by our colleagues Dr. Balázs Horváth, Dr. Balázs Békés, Dr. Levente Takács, and Dr. Donát Hajdú, it’s now live on Oxford Academic.

Hungary has two main tools for separating asset ownership from asset management: trusts, introduced into Hungarian law in 2013, and asset management foundations, which followed in 2019. On paper they aim at similar goals, but in practice they work very differently, and choosing the wrong one can be a costly mistake. Our article walks through where each institution comes from, how they’re governed, and how they’re taxed. The headline takeaway is a trade-off between flexibility and permanence: trusts are a great fit for entrepreneurs or families with medium-term plans, or temporary asset segregation, while asset management foundations can support far more complex, multi-generational family structures and are really built for ultra-high-net-worth, long-term wealth planning.

We constantly get asked by our clients, both Hungarian and international, who are exploring how to structure family wealth or business succession: should they use a trust or a foundation? There wasn’t a single, clear, comparative resource pulling together the legal, governance, and tax angles side by side, so we decided to write one ourselves, drawing on what we see day-to-day advising clients on exactly this choice. And as Hungary’s still-young trust and foundation regime keeps drawing more international families and businesses looking to structure wealth here, we think a clear comparative reference like this is genuinely useful, both for our clients and for fellow practitioners, which is also why we’re proud to have it featured in a leading international trusts publication.

Read the full article here: https://academic.oup.com/tandt/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/tandt/ttag042/8711449